Featured
Is Martin Luther King’s dream still alive? By Peniel E. Joseph / CNN
Against the backdrop of the racial and political reckoning of 2020 and the racial progress and political backlash that have followed, it is worth asking the question: Is the dream that King spoke of at the March on Washington alive in our own time?
The answer is a resounding yes.
The Biden-Harris Administration continues to take meaningful policy steps towards building the “Beloved Community” that King outlined at the March on Washington. From Biden’s inaugural address, where he became the first president to characterize white supremacist racial terror as an existential threat to democracy to executive orders that centered equity, this has thus far been an extraordinary presidency. As the nation heads toward the midterm elections, it is worth taking a deeper dive into what the Biden Administration has managed to accomplish in the most divisive political climate in perhaps more than a century. Read more
Political / Social
In fiery midterm speech, Biden says GOP’s turned toward ‘semi-fascism.’ By Matt Viser / Wash Post
It was some of the strongest language used by Biden, a politician long known — and at times criticized for — his willingness to work with members of the opposite party
Related: Biden just used the f-word — and he’s correct. By Dana Milbank / Wash Post
Biden’s loan forgiveness plan to heavily impact Black borrowers. By Kiara Alfonseca / ABC News
Twenty million people will have their loans completely wiped.
President Joe Biden’s plans to cancel student loans will particularly impact Black Americans, who carry much of the burden of student loan debt. “The burden is especially heavy on Black and Hispanic borrowers, who on average have less family wealth to pay for it,” Biden said in a tweet. “And the pandemic only made things worse.” For those making under $125,000 a year, $10,000 in loans will be erased. For borrowers who received federal Pell grants, which is aid given to undergraduate students who display “exceptional financial need,” up to $20,000 in loans could be canceled. Read more
Black Americans feel disproportionate pain from high interest rates. By Cheyanne M. Daniels and Sylvan Lane / The Hill
The federal government’s efforts to stanch inflation are disproportionately impacting Black Americans.
The Federal Reserve has hiked interest rates in the hopes of cooling off a red-hot economy, but its actions are hitting Black Americans — who have historically been squeezed out of home ownership and affordable loans — the hardest. “African Americans have the lowest homeownership rates among the four major racial groups in the country,” Romie Tribble, professor of economics at Spelman College and secretary of the National Economic Association, told The Hill. Read more
Related: Biden’s Climate Bill Isn’t Enough for People of Color. By Marquis Cole / The Progressive Magazine
School segregation affects more than a third of U.S. students. Here’s why. Marc Ramirez / USA Today
Last month, the U.S. General Accountability Office publicly released findings of an analysis showing that more than a third of public-school students still attend schools that are largely segregated. The analysis submitted to the House Committee on Education and Labor examined Common Core data compiled by the Department of Education. Despite a “significantly more diverse” student population overall, it said, schools nationwide – including those in urban, suburban and rural areas – are still divided along racial, ethnic and economic lines. Read more
The Culture War Is Chasing Teachers Away, Leaving Kids Shortchanged. By Nathalie Baptiste / HuffPost
About 300,000 teachers have left their jobs since 2020. Conservatives targeting those who support racial justice and LGBTQ students are making the shortage even worse.
With low pay and a lack of resources for students, teaching has long been an undervalued profession and the shortage of teachers has grown each year. But now, in the wake of intense pressure from conservative parents and politicians, teachers have become caught in the cacophony of the right-wing culture warriors — whether or not they want to be. Read more
Related: Back to School in DeSantis’s Florida, as Teachers Look Over Their Shoulders. By Sarah Mervosh / NYT
Affirmative Action Was Banned at Two Top Universities. They Say They Need It. By Steohanie Saul / NYT
As a Supreme Court case on college admissions nears, the California and Michigan university systems say their efforts to build diverse classes have hardly worked.
It has been more than 15 years since two of the country’s top public university systems, the University of Michigan and the University of California, were forced to stop using affirmative action in admissions. Since then, both systems have tried to build racially diverse student bodies through extensive outreach and major financial investment, well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Those efforts have fallen abysmally short, the universities admitted in two amicus briefs filed this month at the Supreme Court, which is set to consider the future of affirmative action in college admissions this fall. Read more
Related: The Supreme Court and Racial Inequality. By Alani Golanski / AAIHS
It’s Time to Address The More Subtle Forms of Asian Hate. By Evelyn Nunn / HuffPost
“Therein lies the problem with #StopAsianHate. It has a limited definition of what racism toward us looks and feels like on a daily basis.”
People may want to date us — because they fetishize us as exotic, hypersexual, and excited to submit to a male partner. But we are rarely voted for and are unlikely to lead entire organizations at which white people work. In dating and at work, there’s a palpable difference between being desired and being valued. Many Asian women have experienced the former quite intensely. Very few have experienced the latter. Read more
Who is Maxwell Frost, the Gen Z Democratic nominee in Florida? By David Weigel and Lon Rozsa / Wash Post
Black voter turnout has declined in Wisconsin. Democrats see reversing that trend as key to Senate victory.
To win, Mandela Barnes will need to run up the score in Democratic strongholds like Milwaukee. That could largely hinge on his ability to reverse a recent decline in Black voter turnout.
State Democrats and organizers say that the issue before them isn’t whether many Black voters are deciding between Barnes — who made history as the state’s first Black lieutenant governor — and the Republican incumbent, Sen. Ron Johnson. It’s whether they’ll vote at all. Read more
Walmart must pay Black man $4.4 million in racial profiling case. By Khristopher J. Brooks / CBS News
A Black man in Oregon has been awarded a $4.4 million settlement after a jury decided he had been racially profiled while shopping at Walmart.
Michael Mangum filed a lawsuit last year against the retail giant and one of its employees, alleging that in March of 2020 he was followed around a store in Wood Village, Oregon, by a security worker and then asked to leave once he confronted the employee. Mangum had gone to the store to buy a light bulb for his refrigerator, according to the complaint. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
White Christian Nationalism, Out in the Open. By Annika Brockschmidt and Thomas Lecaque / The Bulwark
Some on the right have grown comfortable being labeled “Christian nationalists.”
Despite the protestations, the term Christian nationalism is well suited for much of the far right. Think of (defeated) Georgia gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor’s slogan “Jesus, Guns, Babies.” Or the extensive Christian symbolism in the crowd that attacked the Capitol on January 6th. Or the Republicans, such as Rep. Lauren Boebert and Doug Mastriano, who have pointedly said they believe in collapsing the separation of church and state. Read more
White evangelicals buried by conservative for abandoning ‘human decency’ to support Trump. By Tom Boggioni / AlterNet
“Here, we have a MAGA movement that is proclaiming some sort of national emergency,” he elaborated. “It is nothing on the scale of Jim Crow it’s not within shouting distance of that. Yet, they have utterly abandoned, in many ways, even the most basic requirements of human decency. Again, in their interactions with each other, interactions with political opponents, in their interactions with truth. This is turning that Christian political ethic utterly upside down.” Read more
The Rising Influence of the New Apostolic Reformation. By Elle Hardy / TNR
The New Apostolic Reformation doesn’t always admit its own existence, but it’s growing in influence in the Republican Party.
Emerging out of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, which account for some 600 million Christians worldwide, the New Apostolic Reformation has arguably become the center of gravity in modern American Christianity. It’s hell-bent on energizing believers for the End Times: Church is no longer something you attend on Sunday—it’s a place to orchestrate the radical transformation of society. Now NAR is becoming increasingly influential within the Republican Party. Read more
Historical / Cultural
The Supreme Court and Racial Inequality. By Alani Golanski / AAIHS
A Breonna Taylor memorial in front of the United States Supreme Court, July 4, 2020, Washington, DC. (Shutterstock)
The Supreme Court’s infamous 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson – issued several decades after white actor Thomas Dartmouth Rice performed in blackface makeup as “Jim Crow,” and seven years prior to W.E.B. Du Bois’s publication of The Souls of Black Folk – upheld the constitutionality of a Louisiana statute requiring that all railway companies “shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races.” The Plessy court held that “the enforced separation of the races” does not deny Black citizens of the equal protection of the laws, within the meaning of the fourteenth amendment. Read more
The Unsung Heroes of the Underground Railroad. By Trisha Posey / Christianity Today
A new study gives Black evangelicals their due.
On August 21 and 22, 1850, a group of fugitive enslaved people and their white supporters met in Cazenovia, New York. During their meeting, the fugitives read a letter to their brothers and sisters still held in bondage in the South. They encouraged enslaved people to stand strong and to resist their masters’ tyranny as they were able. Moreover, they noted that, were a time of slave insurrection to come, “the great majority of the colored men of the North…will be found by your side.” Read more
Appeals court upholds Mississippi Jim Crow-era voting restriction law. By Virginia Langmaid / CNN
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday kept in place a Jim Crow-era voting restriction in Mississippi’s constitution that removes voting rights from people convicted of certain felonies, ruling that the provision was created with racist intent — but no longer operates in a racist manner in the state. According to both majority and dissenting opinions, the law was built with racist intent to keep Black people from voting. Read more
‘A League of Their Own’ remake shows what it’s like to be Black and trans in the 1940s. ByTat Bellamy-Walker / NBC News
The joys and challenges of being a Black transgender man during the 1940s are on full display in the hit queer remake of “A League of Their Own,” which debuted on Amazon this month.
Lea Robinson (pronounced Lee), a Black transgender and nonbinary actor, plays Bertie Hart, the uncle of Maxine “Max” Chapman (Chante Adams). Hart is estranged from his family and lives with his wife, Gracie (Patrice Covington). The show, which was co-created and executive produced by Will Graham and Abbi Jacobson, is a queer adaptation of the 1992 Penny Marshall-directed sports comedy-drama about the real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). The series is set in a time when many baseball teams in the U.S. were racially segregated and women faced sexist barriers to playing on professional teams. Read more
Sports
An all-Black Little League team made history without playing a game. By Chris Lamb / Wash Post
Cannon Street players and coaches watch the Little League World Series championship game in 1955. (Little League Baseball and Softball)
Fourteen Little League baseball players and 10 adults got on an old, battered bus at the Cannon Street YMCA in downtown Charleston, S.C., on the evening of Aug. 24, 1955, to drive more than 700 miles to Williamsport, Pa., for the Little League World Series. The riders were all Black, so they started their 24-hour journey at nightfall, worried they might draw suspicion rolling through the Jim Crow South. The Cannon Street team wasn’t going all this distance in a broken-down bus on unfriendly roads to play in the World Series. The team knew it would not be allowed to compete. Yet it became what Creighton Hale, the former chief executive of Little League Baseball, called “the most significant amateur baseball team in history.” Read more
Edge of Sports: Athletes in the Age of Reaction. The Progressive Magazine
Using sports as a diversion has been a feature of autocratic societies since the days of ancient Rome. As society veers toward autocracy, some have declared 2022 “the year of sportswashing.”
We are living in a profoundly reactionary time. Unelected Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have grabbed the country’s steering wheel, pulled it hard to the right, and driven us straight off a cliff. The crushing of abortion rights, the curtailing of environmental protections, the deification of guns, the elimination of free and fair elections, and the shattering of the wall between church and state have left the majority of us reeling. In my neck of the woods—sports—it raises the question: What is the ethical role of athletes at such a time? Answering this question is crucial, because sports will definitely be used to distract people from the harsh reality of a society sliding into autocracy. Read more
Serena and Venus Williams, Before They Were Champions. By Cindy Shmerier / NYT
A wowed Arthur Ashe invited a reporter to watch the Williams sisters. “Wait until you see them play,” he said. They were 10 and 11.
As soon as I arrived at the Arthur Ashe Youth Tennis Center for an exhibition and fund-raising dinner, Arthur took me aside and said, “There are two little Black girls here and wait until you see them play. They’re sisters, their names are Venus and Serena Williams, and they’re from Compton, California. Oh, and they’re only 11 and 10 years old.” Read more
Can Coco Gauff the Tennis Prodigy Become a Tennis Legend? By Susan Dominus / NYT
Since Coco Gauff went pro at 14, she has played under the weight of high expectations. Now 18, she has her own measures for greatness.
“I grew up watching her,” Gauff said of Williams shortly after the news broke of her retirement. “I mean, that’s the reason why I play tennis.” Watching the Williams sisters dominate a sport that is still predominantly white allowed her to believe she could do the same, she said. Gauff has been proclaimed the heir to the Williams sisters ever since she defeated Venus at Wimbledon, a comparison that she resisted, even as she acknowledged the honor. “I understand why people compare us, but I think it’s just important that I want to be known as Coco,” she said at the 2021 French Open. Read more
NYC honors tennis legend Althea Gibson with street renaming. By Claretta Bellamy / NBC News
Althea Gibson Way is at the intersection of West 143rd Street and Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem
Althea Gibson made history by breaking barriers in tennis. Now she is getting a street renamed in her honor. During a celebration Thursday, Gibson — who was the first Black tennis player to win a Grand Slam title — was honored in her hometown, Harlem, by having a street renamed after her on what would have been her 95th birthday. The intersection of West 143rd Street and Malcolm X Boulevard, where Gibson grew up, is now called Althea Gibson Way. Read more
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